The Great Pretenders

Published: February 9, 1992

(Page 3 of 5)

Bulgaria has never been a good place to hold the orb and scepter, ever since the first monarch in this dynasty was installed more than a century ago. Bulgaria was always being either invaded or threatened by outside powers. Simeon's father, King Boris, had to play toady to Hitler in World War II and died suddenly after a summons to the Fuhrer's eastern field headquarters in August 1943. (Some of the mystery surrounding his abrupt demise was cleared up last November with the discovery of an embalmed heart, together with a document identifying it as Boris's, by a team from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. "Sir, I have your father's heart on the table before me," the chairman told Simeon over the phone. It showed all the signs of coronary occlusion.)

Simeon's uncle, Prince Kyril, and the other regents who ruled in the boy's name over the next two years were executed on Feb. 1, 1945, along with many members of the court, after the Communists had swept the Germans out of the country. The Communists abolished the monarchy and rigged a popular referendum to endorse that decision in 1946, forcing Simeon and his mother, Princess Giovanna of Italy, to flee to Egypt. They arrived in Spain in 1951, but, Simeon is quick to point out: "This house is not a gift of Franco. We had very little funds, and my grandmother in Italy, Queen Helen, helped with the house."

Last summer, the Bulgarians were going to hold a referendum on restoring the monarchy, but the Communists who were then in control of Parliament canceled the plan, Simeon says, after he had his supporters in Bulgaria point out that the decision to hold a new one would mean that the 1946 referendum was void. The political drama in his homeland still has a way to play itself out, he adds.

"We're considered a Grade B former Eastern European state," Simeon complains, and the Ruritanian image is only one of many resentments. He grumbles that a provision in the law on last month's presidential elections -- requiring candidates to be male, born in Bulgaria and to have lived in the country for the past five years -- was seemingly designed to keep him out.

"Maybe they've done me a favor," he says. "If I had run, my foes might have said that it showed I would do anything, including somersaults, to get back in power. If I had chosen not to, they would have said I was so calcified and reactionary that I wouldn't stoop to an election."

The Bulgarian Ambassador in Brussels, Lea Cohen, says Simeon as an individual has a lot more popular appeal in Bulgaria than the monarchy as an institution. Last October, Simeon urged Bulgarian voters to support the opposition to the Communists, who now call themselves the Bulgarian Socialist Party, and the opposition won narrowly. In the meantime, he flies frequently to Vienna or Athens to keep in touch with politics at home. "I have a very carefully planned program," he says. "I think we have to try and be calm." The time to return, he believes, will come "years from now, when I won't get people worked up and excited."

GOING BACK TOO SOON WAS THE painful mistake made at Christmas 1990 by King Michael of Romania, another descendant of Queen Victoria's. At his home in the hills above Lake Geneva, he seems relaxed and philosophical about the debacle. The villa, in Versoix, is mortgaged, and while it is comfortable, it is hardly palatial, although there is a swimming pool in the backyard. It is the kind of place a stockbroker might live in -- and that is what Michael is. He is a self-described "customers' man," pulling in clients for a royalty-loving Greek millionaire's stockbrokerage business.

Exile has grated on him more than on Simeon, perhaps because Michael was 26 when the Communists forced him to give up the throne, and he is now 70. The Communists who made him and his mother, Helen of Greece, leave in December 1947, he says, would not let them take so much as an ashtray. So for a while he had to work as a vegetable gardener in Ayot St. Lawrence, Bernard Shaw's village in England, where royal relatives made him feel welcome. He moved to Switzerland in 1956 to return to his real love -- flying, which he had learned as a military pilot during World War II. His friend William Lear had started a small business installing avionics in private aircraft in Geneva, and Michael's job was to check out the equipment.

"What does it feel like to work for a living?" an American co-worker asked him once, in Santa Monica, Calif. "Well, I've always worked for a living," Michael answered. "But my type of work is not something you understand very well in America."

His only contact with his country for most of the last four decades had been his annual Christmas message transmitted to Romania by the BBC and the Voice of America. The V.O.A. ceased broadcasting the messages in the 1960's because the United States, like most other Western nations, wanted to encourage Nicolae Ceausescu, as brutal a Communist dictator as there ever was, in his rebellion against Soviet domination of the Warsaw Pact. The broadcasts resumed in the Reagan Administration.